The Cooler Me

Not too long ago, I was sitting backstage at the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco and drinking beer with my doppelgänger, a 39-year-old singer-songwriter named Kyle Field. Or rather, I was drinking beer by myself while he entertained his fans, most of whom seemed to be half his age. Despite his best efforts, he'd failed to conceal his grizzly good looks. He was very tan, had a big amber beard, and was wearing a sea captain's hat that somehow added to his charm. There are not many grown men out there who can wear a captain's hat and not look like a member of the Village People, but my doppelgänger is one of them. He spotted me through the haze of pot smoke and lifted his beer, and I lifted mine back. We were the oldest people in the room—perhaps the whole club. And yet we'd entered some alternate universe: a Neverland where no one aged or had children or worried about pesky bourgeois things, like brain cells or health insurance.

"When's your bedtime?" he asked later, clapping me on the back.

"Three hours ago," I said.

He laughed. "We're headed to Edinburgh Castle, if you want to come. Last call isn't for thirty minutes."

"I can't remember the last time I shut down a bar," I said.

"I wish I could say the same."

He went off to talk to a blonde woman in the corner, the sexiest of his three backup singers. He was not hitting on her: Rather, they seemed like old friends, goofing around and singing a song I didn't recognize. I'd always dreamed of being a musician in another life, yet a lot of the ones I'd met were lethargic hipsters so cocooned in their coolness they could hardly bring themselves to smile. Even their sneezes seemed like "sneezes." Kyle, on the other hand, was sincere and friendly and strangely innocent, someone who talked about "making out" with women and threw his head back when he laughed. I glanced at the person sitting next to me, a very stoned-looking girl who'd maybe spent a summer or two working with Tibetan orphans.

She looked from me to Kyle again, as if imagining him with overpriced glasses and a hairline in sudden retreat. "You can be anything you want to be, I think."

I nodded, though this seemed to me patently false. It assumed, for example, that you didn't want conflicting things at the same time. Case in point: I love my family dearly, and yet I'd boarded a plane to San Francisco that afternoon with a breezelike feeling of escape. I'd been up since 5:00 a.m., when my son tended to begin screaming. He was 18 months old and had yet to wake up in a way that was anything less than cataclysmic. That morning, I left my wife sleeping in bed and carried Clem into the kitchen to make coffee, but he would not let me do this. "Mama!" he yelled at me, shaking his head. He insisted on calling me "Mama"—his revenge, probably, for our having named him Clem. He cried until I took him to the window, where he could look at the backhoe parked across the street. I couldn't move from the window without incurring his wrath. When I finally put him down, the screaming woke up my daughter, Tess, who burst out of her room and collapsed on the couch.

"Which Pokémon do you want to be?" she yelled over Clem's screams.

"I don't know, sweetie. I haven't had any coffee yet."

"You can be a Basic or a Legendary if you want. Do you want to be Ho-Oh?"

If someone asked me to prove my undying love for my daughter, I would tell him that I have pretended to be over fifty different Pokémon characters. I have watched an entire Pokémon Advanced Battle DVD, which is essentially like roasting your soul on a spit.

"I don't want you to be Ho-Oh. Giratina is actually really powerful. He can do Shadow Force, DragonBreath, and Ominous Wind."

I looked over at Clem, who'd stopped crying and appeared to be passing some ominous wind. I took a moment to imagine the rest of my morning, the frantic work of keeping two children happy while getting them fed and dressed and ready for school,doing my best to bring Giratina to life while trying to clean the shit from my son's scrotum.

I mention all this not to complain about my life but to explain the buoyancy I'd felt on the flight to San Francisco and then later walking to a bar at one in the morning with my cosmic double, the person who'd fulfilled all the unfettered, bohemian dreams I'd had for myself right out of college. I'd imagined living in a house of hungry, half-crazed artists somewhere, a place with secondhand furniture and thirdhand lovers, all of us thumbing our noses at society while we aged gracelessly into fame. Like the Beats, the Lost Generation, the Merry Pranksters—whatever they ended up calling us, we'd have a "the" before our name. But aside from a brief bacchanalia in San Francisco that involved a weirdly polite orgy, I never found the bohemia of my dreams. Instead I went to grad school and stumbled upon the woman of my dreams. It took us nine years to get married—mostly because we believed it to be the last nail in the coffin, the apogee of conventionality—but we tied the knot eventually and had two kids and settled into an apartment with tastefully worn furniture and a fancy espresso machine that we never use. The truth is, despite the mornings of hellish Mr. Mom frenzy, there are plenty of blissed-out moments when I'm cuddling with my son or daughter on the couch and feel like I've found myself, that I've been blessed. Still, I can't help wondering.

Kyle and I ordered beers at the bar and then ended up stationed around the pool table while his bandmates played eight ball. The music was hip and deafening, and I worried about the elfin roar of tinnitus that had recently begun in my left ear. All around me, twentysomethings seemed to be having the time of their lives. Kyle was in fine form, making everyone laugh in his skipper's hat, but it was hard to tell if he was captain of an enchanted boat or a sinking ship. This was why I was visiting, to experience his life for a couple of days. Was my doppelgänger happier than I was?

···

As a writer, I'd always been fascinated by the trope of the doppelgänger and its long literary life, from Dostoyevsky to Nabokov to Spider-Man. Often, in books, these physical doubles represent the worst a character is capable of. Lately, though, perhaps because at age 41 I'd begun feeling less like the captain of my life and more like its deckhand, I'd started wonderingif there was someone out there who embodies not your worst self, but your freest one—a person who encapsulates everything you've ever dreamed of becoming. Let's call him your Cooler Self. All those dreams that got lost along the way, the ones that were casualties of chance or duty or cowardice: There's a "you" out there—a mountain climber or war photographer or race-car driver—who brought them to fruition.

So I vowed to hunt down my Cooler Self. Demographically, I had a few rules: He had to be male, straight, educated, approximately my age, someone—if circumstances had been different—I could imagine becoming. I sent out an e-mail to my friends and was amazed by the number of names they came up with. There were actors, comedians, rock musicians, jazz guitarists, poets, choreographers, architects, artists, ad men, playwrights, and an avant-garde endurance drummer. There was an indie-rock singer who lived in a house full of young Swedish women and an erotic photographer who looked like Jesus. At some point in this dog pile of doppelgängers, I found Kyle Field, the brains behind the band Little Wings.

Less famous than some of the others on the list, but with a devoted cult following. I listened to one of his songs—a gorgeous number called "Look at What the Light Did Now"—that reminded me of an angelic-voiced Will Oldham. Then, as fate would have it, I found an Internet video of him singing a cozy duet with Feist. In the video, they're staring into each other's eyes, lounging in a rocky canyon somewhere with matching peacock feathers tucked behind their ears. They're singing that same song about the light, and though it's possible I'm reading into it, it seems pretty clear to me they want to fuck each other. This was the moment when he had me. It just so happens that Feist had become something of a deity in our house: Clem's all-time favorite video clip was her guest appearance on Sesame Street, when she sings "1234" while counting monsters and animals. I must have seen the thing over fifty times. Now, I like Feist; I think she's plenty talented. But the act of watching her bounce around with chickens in sunglasses so many times had rendered her grotesque. Basically she'd become a Muppet. So this clip of her soul-singing with Kyle Field—both of them, judging from how long they keep their eyes closed after the song is done, in no state to do much counting—seemed the perfect inverse of my life.

Of course, it wasn't just the Feist video that swayed me. My friend, in talking Kyle up, had made him sound like a modern-day Dean Moriarty. He'd also said there was something about Kyle that reminded him of me, something he couldn't exactly put his finger on, which made me intrigued and suspicious. By sheer coincidence the guy was playing a show in Portland, where my family and I were house-sitting for a month. I called him up on his cell phone.

Silence. In the background I could hear what sounded like a ukulele. What if he—my own double—thought I was a creep? "About time you found me," he said.

"You don't have a family, do you? Or a brand-new station wagon?"

He laughed.

"What time can I come by?" I asked.

"Oh, anytime. I'll just be kicking it around the house."

Kicking it. This is not a concept in our house. I drove out to the scruffy edge of southeastern Portland and pulled up to the place where my doppelgänger was staying, nervous about intruding. The house was everything I'd ever dreamed of—at least when I used to dream of such a life. There was a pile of construction lumber in the front yard, and the porch was covered in beer cans and Goodwill furniture and well-thumbed paperbacks, some of them as warped as giant clams. The front door was open, but when I called hello no one answered. If a stranger strode unannounced into my kitchen in L.A., I would have stabbed him with a knife, but the young couple I found fixing themselves a drink paid me no mind whatsoever. I had the sense I wasn't the first stranger to show up in their kitchen that day. I asked them where Kyle was, and they shrugged, telling me I was free to hunt around upstairs.

But when I climbed the stairs, I found only a few walls standing, and in place of a roof I saw the blue dome of the sky. If it had been dark, I might have plummeted to my death. I realized—to my delight—that the house was under construction.

I heard a shower running, so I went out to the front porch to wait for my doppelgänger to emerge. Eventually he did, dripping water on the floor. Would you believe me if I said I felt an immediate connection? That we grinned at each other, unable to contain ourselves? Except for our Teutonic height, we looked almost nothing alike: There was that beard, the kind you might call Whitmanesque, and he was wearing a trucker cap that said car-tricity. I'd bought him some beer, and we sat outside in the backyard. Because of the -construction, the owner of the place had moved his room into the yard, so that there was an immaculately made bed sitting in the middle of the grass. You could see the sky through the upstairs window of the house, a magic drift of clouds, like something from a Magritte painting.

I clinked beers with my cooler self, sitting next to a little wooden tepee stationed in the corner of the yard. I peered inside: It was horticultural, built to disguise a thicket of pot plants. Kyle took a swig. There was a clothespin clipped, inexplicably, to the brim of his cap. I wondered if he was crazy. Despite our connection, I half expected to dislike him—wanted to, perhaps, in order to validate the choices I'd made. I told him that the bed in the middle of the yard reminded me of an '80s music video.

"Oh, that the coolest people live in the cities with the tallest trees. I think because big trees remind you how small you are."

I nodded. We talked about San Francisco as a pretty good place for tree stature, and

I lamented that living there had become too expensive for anyone but hedge funders and Google employees. You couldn't find an apartment for under $2,000.

"I pay $475 a month," he said.

"How many roommates do you have?"

He shrugged. "Depends on the month."

I told him I was worried San Francisco was becoming like Paris or Manhattan, a city under glass, and Kyle surprised me by bursting into song. It took me a second to realize he was improvising a new set of lyrics to "Message in a Bottle." City in a bot-tle, he sang, doing an uncanny impersonation of Sting. He did not stop at the chorus but ad-libbed an entire verse about driving into the bottle's mouth from the Golden Gate Bridge. I laughed out loud. I was beginning to realize, partly to my dismay, that my doppelgänger had turned out very well. He was funny and charismatic, someone who could talk about "the three-way mirror of performance" without sounding pretentious. I liked him a great deal. It occurred to me he might be one of those rare people who make you feel as at home in his mind as you are in your own.

I kept waiting for him to disenchant me somehow, but it never happened. Instead we talked for five hours straight, sharing intimate details about our lives. As you might expect, there was some overlap: We both grew up in suburban L.A. We surfed as teenagers. We loved the band the Silver Jews. We'd both worked in assisted-living facilities. As a young man, too, he was never attracted to the idea of settling down. Marriage, family, material comforts: All of it daunted him. Unlike me, though, his priorities hadn't changed. He spoke about the halcyon years of his twenties—living in a house in San Luis Obispo, making music with his bandmate and good friend, the future indie celebrity M. Ward—not with the heartsick nostalgia of most people nearing middle age, but as if they were still in full swing. His Saturn-return moment, Kyle said, happened when he was 28 and working in a liquor store, playing music and making art. He realized he preferred the life of a lazy grasshopper. In fact, he explained to me, what people perceived as laziness wasn't laziness at all, but a kind of bravery.

"It was like being winked into a secret world," Kyle said. "I sort of realized I didn't have to be a busy ant. People get so caught up in ending up somewhere specific, in chasing a certain kind of life, but it's like that Alan Watts quote: Every point on the surface of the sphere is the center of the surface.You're at the center already."

"Do you ever wish you had more money?" I asked.

"Always," he said. "Are you kidding? When it comes down to it, though, all I really need is a skateboard and an iPod. I can write songs anywhere."

What about kids? I asked. A family? Did he ever worry he was missing out on something?

He stared at the bed sitting in the middle of the yard. "I haven't knocked it off the list. It might be fun to be one of those freaky old dads. But I'm too attached to my freedom, I guess—waking up at 10 a.m. and hopping on my skateboard to check out the surf. I like watching all the bandwagoners hustling off to work. If I'm feeling good, I'm the king of the world."

"And if you're feeling bad?"

"I'm the scum of the earth."

I told him that children would help with that. If I'd had a bad day of writing or teaching and I was generally feeling like a worthless piece of shit, there was nothing like being greeted by your kids back at home to snap things into perspective. I was bragging a bit—I wanted to squeeze some jealousy from him—but it was also, I felt, one of the unconditional rewards of fatherhood.

"But it's important to feel like scum sometimes, isn't it?" Kyle said. "To get down in that dark place and dwell awhile?"

I looked up at the house, surprised to see stars twinkling in the empty window frame. It was one of the hardest parts of family life, actually, the thing maybe I missed the most: the loss of that lonelyplace I used to dwell. As a young man drunk on books, I used to walk the streets for hours, feeling like an alien creature, following the darkening detours of my mind. People tend to talk about self-absorption as if it were a bad thing, but I missed those walks very much.

"So you've never regretted being a lazy grasshopper?" I asked.

"Oh, sure," he said, and he told me a story about living in a shack in someone's backyard, waking up every morning with -freezing-cold eyeballs. This was two years ago. His mind was plagued; he couldn't make music; nothing he did seemed to make sense. "I was writing checks that my life couldn't cash," was how he put it. The only thing that kept him from offing himself was picturing his little brother's face, how it would react to the news. But he'd pulled himself out of it now: He was alive, healthy; life had never been better. His checks were good. The story was familiar—I'd lived a version of it myself.

A wave of friends showed up at the house, and we sat out on the porch and drank more beer and sampled a gooey-looking bud plucked from a Mason jar we'd had some trouble finding in the dark. How I missed this life! The friends, the aimless camaraderie, the nowhere particular to be. Earlier Kyle told me that when he was on tour, he never had to book a hotel room because there was always somebody to welcome him, a couch he could crash on.

"Even in Europe?"

"I have a lot of friends," he said. "It's a different kind of wealth."

···

In one of my favorite movies, The Double Life of Véronique, the daily life of a Frenchwoman named Véronique is mirrored by the life of her Polish doppel-gänger, Weronika, who's played by the same actress. The two Veronicas never meet. Still, there's an uncanny moment near the end of the film when Véronique sees herself in a photo she took as a tourist in Kraków. This is Weronika, who by that point in the film has died of a heart ailment. Rather than awe or amazement, Véronique feels uncontrollable grief. The film seems to suggest it's not the fact that she has a doppel-gänger that upsets her, but that she's seen herself living another life. Perhaps what had seemed like destiny, her one true life, was simply a matter of chance.

After meeting Kyle, I started to think about why I'd chosen the life I had and not a less conventional one. I'd always considered it to be accidental: I fell in love, I lived in Tucson instead of Brooklyn, I never found the group of eccentric bons vivants I was looking for. But what if this actually wasn't the case at all? What if I needed the attachment of family, the ballast of the same bourgeois comforts I pretended to disdain, in order to survive? What if, given the same trajectory as my doppelgänger, I would never have made it out of that backyard shack alive?

The truth is, I'd had opportunities in my early twenties to lead a different kind of life, ones I tended to forget. I'd lived in Portland for a few months during its creative heyday, before anyone knew what a fid-gear bike was or cared about the provenance of their meat. Somewhere in the city Gus Van Sant was casting his next film, Miranda July was making her mark on the DIY art scene—and I was sitting in an apartment by myself, sleeping on the couch because I was too depressed to buy a futon. The only friends I made were the two severely retarded men I was looking after to pay the rent. From an artistic perspective, I couldn't have been less productive. In fact, I didn't start writing my first book until I met my wife and we'd settled into a life of cozy domestic routine. My first break came on a story about a suicidally depressed man living in Portland, based entirely on myself, but I wouldn't have been able to write it then—only while looking at a photograph of myself, from a different life.

···

Two months after meeting Kyle for the first time, I was on that plane to San Francisco, feeling a gust of freedom. This was my chance to see what his life was really like, in the place where he lived, and I was half-hoping he might reveal his secret despair. And I did see a glimpse of something: not despair, but a crack in the bohemian idyll. It was Kyle's first time headlining the Great American Music Hall, one of the most famous clubs in San Francisco, and despite the good vibes backstage afterward, the biggest show of his career had not gone as well as he'd hoped. For whatever reason, the band had never jelled, and it was late enough by the time they came on that the crowd's energy had already begun to drift homeward. Watching from the audience, I began to feel like somehow I was responsible.

"That was a cave gig last night," he said the next day, sitting on the porch of the hundred-year-old house he currently shared with four roommates. I asked him what he meant. He told me he'd felt like Sisyphus up there: not pushing the rock uphill, but chasing it back down through a crowded village. "Not even crowded—sparsely crowded."

We'd ended up shutting down the bar the night before, as he'd predicted, and I had a splitting headache. All I could think about between medicinal puffs of weed was my wife at home with the kids. She was a smart, beautiful, talented woman, and I had not slept well without her. Occasionally the front door would open and one of Kyle's roommates would squeeze past us on the way to somewhere, looking relieved to be outside. The house had a roof on it, at least, but it was quite small and did not seem intended for five people who weren't intimate. There was only one bathroom, for example.

"What do you do if someone's in there?" I asked.

"Pee in the backyard," he said.

I nodded. I could tell you how much I missed my children, or the way Clem giggled when I threw him into the air, or the tenderness of my wife's good-byes as I went off to grade papers—but that wouldn't be the full truth. I also liked sitting out there on the porch in the middle of the afternoon, feeling stoned and hung-over and debating whether "wait a fuck" was actually a Scorsesean expression or if my doppelgänger had invented it. I would not want to be doing it every day—or even every weekend—but I liked it then. And every time Kyle's life began to seem less than ideal to me, something else would surprise me and make it seem blessed.

There was his amazing popularity in the neighborhood, for instance. It seemed like everyone who walked by burst out smiling or yelled his name or asked him if he wanted to hit the surf. "My buddies," he called them. It was like sitting next to the groom at a wedding reception. When we went to buy beer at the corner, the Korean convenience-store owner embraced him like a son. In L.A., my life was consumed by family—I knew almost none of my neighbors, and the ones I did know I actively avoided. I had a balcony, but I never used it. If I wasn't inside the tortoiseshell of our beautiful apartment, I was in our low-emission station wagon driving the kids somewhere or getting myself to work. Here was a man who lived three blocks from the beach, one block from Golden Gate Park, whose life—as far as I could tell—was spent on porches. He even went outside to piss.

My point is: Even after the biggest show of his career had not gone well—been, in fact, something of a bust—my -doppelgänger seemed pretty damn happy. He told me a story about a trip he'd taken to Big Sur with a bunch of musician pals, how they'd decided to strip naked in the middle of the night and stand by the side of the road waiting for cars. Each time they saw one approaching, they posed like Greek statues, amazing its passengers when the headlights flashed upon them. I thought: I would have been the person driving past, astonished and laughing and sad not to be them.

At some point during the afternoon, Kyle got a text from one of his female friends that said "i feel like hanging out." I told him that if he needed to go, I'd understand.

"No. I already texted her back, but she doesn't want to come over. She just meant, literally, that she feels like hanging out."

He seemed delighted. I couldn't blame him: There was something poignant about the whole idea of this. Sometimes you can feel like doing something, feel like being somewhere else, without actually wanting to give up what you're doing.

For some reason, I told Kyle about how I'd asked my daughter recently what she wanted to be for Halloween, and she'd said "a confused chicken." This apparently meant dressing up like a chicken but pretending not to know what she was. I couldn't help thinking she'd hit upon a deep ontological truth: the idea that who you were would be obvious to everyone else but yourself.

Kyle looked at me carefully. "You love your kids."

"Yeah," I said.

"You know, I've started thinking of you as my bourgeois doppelgänger."

I tried to be flattered about this. The way he'd said "bourgeois" made it sound almost like a compliment. "Still, I can't help thinking what else I might have accomplished if I hadn't had children. Like I'm wasting my talent or something."

"There's always something else you could be doing," he said. "We're wasting a life as we speak."

···

There's a reason we drift toward attachment, I think, as we get older— attachment to people, to work, to things. As death moves closer, we try our hardest to dig in. We pound in the stakes so that our tents don't blow away. Still, it makes sense to me that the perceptions we once had of ourselves would be hard to cast off. We miss our youth, our freedom—which is not the same thing as wanting it back. We may think it is, but it's not. We're all confused chickens.

Among the many casually profound things Kyle said to me was a joke he'd made at that crowded bar we went to after his show. We were drinking beer with five or six of his friends, who were vying for the attention of his sexy backup singer. Watching them reminded me of what the dating scene was like. It was not something I missed. I was standing beside the pool table, blocking a stream of fucked-up twentysomethings on their way to the bathroom.

"I'm in the wrong place," I said, after getting splashed with beer.

"Aren't we all," Kyle said.

Which reminds me, now, of the student who came to see me in my office last year. I'd spent the morning grading short stories with titles like "Runaway Grandma"—time I might have spent writing my own fiction—and though I loved to teach, I was not at that moment feeling terribly well-disposed toward the academic life. The student was a very sweet kid, earnest and hardworking, who liked to refer to himself as a writer. I asked him if he'd thought about what he was going to do after he graduated, hoping to nudge him in the direction of something he was more gifted at.

"I want to be you," he said.

"Why?" I asked, startled.

He looked around my office, as if it were the answer to his question. In fact, it was one of the worst offices on campus. You could hear every splash and grunt from the bathroom across the hall, and one of the ceiling tiles was missing.

For a while after visiting San Francisco, I couldn't shake the strange, ghostly feeling—like Véronique in that movie—of having glimpsed myself in another place. The truth is, now that I've sought out my doppelgänger, I don't feel any surer about the choices I've made in life. Sitting obediently through a faculty meeting or cleaning up the daily FEMA disaster of our kitchen, I think of the men out there directing films or traveling the world or simply reading a book before nine o'clock at night, and I feel a gust of Kyle envy. Some part of me will always feel the shadow of another life.

Recently I went to see a famous old poet read at the college where I teach. His poems were about death, yet they were hopeful and elegiac. Between poems, he rambled on about not being afraid of the unknown. He talked about his friends in Hawaii who were astronomers, how they understood that time was a fiction. He discussed the last line of his most famous poem, how it is important to bow "not knowing to what." Then something terrible happened. He began to trip over his words. He seemed lost and disoriented. Eventually he said he felt too weak to go on, and when he sat back down his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he lay there motionless, gaping at the ceiling. I thought he'd had a stroke. The look on his face—its yawn of frozen terror—seemed like a perfect rebuttal of everything he'd been talking about, of his life's work. Time, it seemed to say, was definitely not a fiction.

They shepherded us out of the room while sirens wailed in the distance. Strangely, when I got outside, my first thought was: Did he have children? It seemed like a very important question. As it turned out, it wasn't a stroke, he'd be okay—but I didn't know that yet. When I got home, my daughter was still awake, and I kissed her good night and sat on her bed longer than usual. I told her a story from my childhood, one of her favorites, and she corrected me when I got a detail wrong. She knew the story better than I did. Miniature plastic planets hung from her ceiling, meant to mimic the geography of the solar system. A few of them—like Saturn—had fallen off, but the earth still dangled above us, hanging literally by a thread. If someone told me I was going to die tomorrow, I thought, I would still want to be sitting right here. Because it was going to happen someday—very soon, in fact, in cosmological time—and it mattered immensely where I was. There was no time not to waste.

Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (effective 1/4/2014) and Privacy Policy (effective 1/4/2014).The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with prior written permission of Condé Nast.